Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [121]
He recognized Johnny—no longer a boy, but a full-grown man—as soon as he entered the restaurant. Ravi was unfashionably early and was already nearing the bottom of his first Manhattan. Should he have invited him over to the house instead? He’d worried that his decision to forgo a tie was too casual—with his navy blazer, he’d chosen his gold anchor cuff links—but Johnny was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, like an American film actor from the fifties. He was also wearing earrings and an eye-catching assortment of tattoos, but there was no doubt in Ravi’s mind: he was the little boy he had loved for a short time, and had sheltered in his home, before Bonnie Michaels had run off with him and with their son.
“I thought even vegetarians ate fish these days,” Ravi said once they had dispensed with their hellos and their orders. He’d chosen a seafood place on the bay, with tanks of lobsters and rafters cobwebbed with fishing nets.
“Not this one,” Johnny said, but his smile was meant to reassure. Ravi could tell already he was a good kid. Tattoos or no, Bonnie or no, he’d done well for himself.
“So, tell me about this rock band,” Ravi said, as though Johnny were his stepson, and they were meeting for their weekly meal together. They had a lifetime to catch up on, but the conversation had settled on the present. Neither one of them seemed anxious to overturn the facts of Edward’s life and death, which had already been exhumed, examined, and buried again during their brief exchange of letters. Johnny had written that Edward—Johnny called him Teddy, an infantile name—had died of a drug overdose. This just after Bonnie—who now called herself Beatrice McNicholas—had left the town they were living in, Lintonburg, Vermont, which had followed six or seven other hamlets of similar camouflage. And this just after Johnny, in response to Edward’s questions about his father, had threatened to help find him, sending Bonnie running again. The fact that his son had wanted to know him was a sour comfort, like the taste of a red wine turned to vinegar.
In a manila envelope, Ravi had sent Johnny the mementos, carefully copied on the office machine, that had lived in a shoe box for so many years. HOUSEKEEPER SNATCHES SON? from the local section of the Herald, the question mark that had embittered Ravi more than any epithet; police reports detailing the search for the missing child Edward Michaels; and a photo of the four of them at the beach—Bonnie and Ravi in plastic beach chairs, the baby in her lap, towheaded Johnny in a diaper in the sand, their eye sockets blackened spectrally by the sun. These were the days before the faces on the milk carton, but Ravi would have tried that if he could. He had driven all over the country. (His wife, Arpita, had learned about the United States in a boarding school in Connecticut. Ravi had learned about it by searching for his son.) He had offered a reward. He had hired the best lawyers he could afford on a gardener’s salary. When that hadn’t worked, he’d become one himself. Fifteen years later, he had not found his son, but he had made a decent living furnishing divorces to disgraced American wives.
Ravi did not fail to appreciate the irony: Bonnie had left him because she was disgraced. She had never been his wife, but the day she’d discovered his dalliance with the woman who worked behind the front desk, she and the boys were gone. He’d expected her to be back in a day or two, once she’d cooled off. Bonnie had been a drinker. (He hadn’t been then, but he was now.) She had a temper. They’d go dancing in South Beach—it was the seventies, they were young—and he’d dance too close to another woman, and she’d take the boys and stay with a friend, and come back in the morning, hungover and forgiving. But this time she’d also taken Ravi’s prized family possession, his grandfather’s marble statue of Lord Krishna, no taller than a bottle of wine, with a flute